Though he claims to be very private, even secretive, Jim Crace doesn’t avoid
contact with journalists and critics. When I first called him a couple of years
ago, he agreed readily to an interview. (This wasn’t wholly out of the blue: I
live in England and we had met once before, briefly; we have acquaintances in
common; and I had written a review of Being Dead, his fifth novel, which
in America won The National Book Critics Circle Award.) He was friendly over
the phone, surprisingly chatty, no sign of British reserve. He joked about the
city where he lives, Birmingham, being a backwater: Because he’s not in London,
he’s invisible, no one visits, no one calls; he sits alone waiting for the
doorbell or the phone to ring, then gets bored and writes a novel. It was
cheerful patter, a little social routine.

Crace’s biographer will have a hell of a time. It’s not just that he leads a
quiet life, that the most fascinating thing he does is to sit alone in a room
and write – you could have said the same, despite their busy lives, about
Samuel Johnson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Ernest Hemingway. No – the real
problem for the would-be biographer is that on the pages of Jim Crace’s novels
there are very few clues as to what he himself, the man outside that lonely
room, is like; and only an especially gymnastic critic could show how the life
accounts for the work. This pleases Crace, he’s proud of it: He likes to be
invisible, a writer who erases himself. “I am not my own subject matter,” he
says.

What kind of link with an author does a reader require? Is a name enough? Would
“Anonymous” do the trick? Or is it important to be able to identify the
writer’s fingerprints, a smudged whorl of ego? If you knew Jim Crace well and
you knew his work, you could possibly pick out here and there a connection
between the fiction and autobiographical fact – but even inEngland, few people know the work and fewer know the man.
That will change over time: The books will be discovered, the author celebrated
in newspaper and magazine profiles, on literary talk shows. For now, I suppose,
if his fans were loyally respectful of his aversion to literary self-exposure,
they – we – would spurn even meager book-jacket revelations. Take a look at the
author photo for The Devil’s Larder, his latest; you see a middle-aged
white man with a high forehead, an intense, almost fierce stare, and a hint of
humor around the mouth; below this enigmatic image, the opaque news that he’s
the prizewinning author of Quarantine
(1998) and Being Dead (2000), and
that he lives in Birmingham, England. What does this tell you? The Devil’s
Larder is sly and elliptical and mostly about food; Quarantine is a majestically self-assured re-imagining of Jesus’
40-day fast in the desert; Being Dead
is shocking in parts (a couple brutally murdered at the beach, their corpses
rotting in the dunes). Each of these books is remarkably beautiful, the
language rich and tightly controlled; each in its way iscruel. The city in which the author lives, once a mighty
manufacturing capital, is struggling to redefine itself. But who is Jim Crace?

Perhaps we ought to do what he would do: Make it up. A string of bold lies,
like this: Jim Crace divides his time between an abandoned monastery in
Montenegro and a fishing village in Nova Scotia. Though he trained as an
entomologist, he spent many years working as a short-order cook. His cat’s name
is Metronome.

Alas, we’re not Crace, we’re just curious readers wondering about a man whose
extraordinary imagination has stirred us up. Precisely because we lack his
imaginative powers, we want to meet him, to shake his hand and peer into his
eyes; because we can’t invent him, we grasp for a few facts. It’s
superstitious, maybe, like hoarding a saint’s relics.

Crace can’t cling to anonymity (Pynchon and Salinger are hounded precisely
because they demand to be left alone), and anyway he doesn’t want it. So I’m
ready to introduce you, to cast aside the curtain and show you the wizard as
unassuming citizen (“I’m not particularly interested in literature,” he
insists); I’ll take you right into his ordinary suburban house where he and his
working wife raised their two children; I’ll even let you pat his dog, a scruffy
mongrel with a graying muzzle (whose name is Shandy, not Metronome).

But first, the books. Crace’s talent is hard to pin down because he seems
always to be straddling a divide. His fiction is full of meticulous lies that
sound like sober scientific fact, and routine facts dressed up in fairy-tale
costume. He’s brilliant at exploiting the tension between the highly specific
and the generic, between an historical moment and timelessness, between an
imaginary topography and the invented landscape’s familiar features, which feel
as real as your backyard. The cruelty in his books does a little dance with
tenderness; humor and sadness do the same. Crace can show you a world in which
god and the devil duke it out, or a world ruled by implacable natural laws –
and he’s just as convincing either way. The supernatural seems perfectly
plausible in his work, but so does the idea of a godless universe, an
accidental venue for blind biology and purposeless physics. In a Crace novel,
nearly everything is equivocal, even the rhythm of the writing. A few critics
claim that he writes in iambic pentameter; they’re wrong, but the error points
in the right direction: Crace’s prose flirts shamelessly with poetry.

When he talks about his writing, Crace makes a distinction between the“traditional” and the
“conventional.” He explains: “If you look at theoldtraditional
stories, the character of the storyteller is completelyabsent – but the invention is entire.” This is what he’s
trying to achievein his
fiction; he takes as his model the impersonal narratives infolktales, fables, legends and myths. “I lose myself,” he
says, “in therealms of pure
invention.” By “conventional” writing he means themainstream realist novel, Stendhal’s famous strolling mirror.
“Realistfiction locates you,”
he says. “Imaginative fiction dislocates. Whattraditional writing does – what I do – is to dislocate the
issues of the realworld and
place them elsewhere." (Of his seven books, only two are anchoredby a “real” geography – an English
harbor town in Signals of Distress andthe Judean desert in Quarantine.
The rest, as one waggish critic hassuggested,
are set in Craceland.)

And yet it would be misleading to say that Crace is purely a “traditional”writer, a modern-day maker of myth and legend; it would be
untrue to theexperience of
reading his books. Crace claims that he “lacks realistskills,” but nonetheless he has an uncanny talent for making
inventedplaces and events feel
here-and-now real, a talent helped along by thereader’s ingrained habit of reconstructing a recognizable
reality even in awholly
imaginary landscape. In his way, Crace locates the reader as surelyas Jane Austen does; the fact that
he puts you in a place that can’t befound
on a map doesn’t matter much from page to page. Crace’s “elsewhere”hardly
ever feels disorienting; on the contrary – the reader is reassured byan impressive verisimilitude. In
short, Crace convinces. His trick is tozigzag
between the “traditional” and “conventional” modes, sometimes in thespace of a single sentence; and
the closer you look at his writing, themore
obvious it becomes that he plays the one off the other. He can makean anatomy lesson sound like a
fable, or dissect a demon with a coroner’sskeptical
eye.

Though I plan to say a quick word about each of the books, I’m going toconcentrate on Quarantine and Being Dead. I think of those two novels as amatched pair, not because they’re similar but because they
compliment eachother. Quarantine retells a New Testament story,
and so one might expect itto be
an utterly “traditional” tale; Being Dead
monitors the biologicalprocesses
of death and decomposition, and so one might expect it to be“conventional,” an exercise in
steely realism. These expectations aremet
– and confounded. Quarantine tests
religious faith against the limitingfacts
of human anatomy; Being Dead tests
strict materialism against thedemands
of spirituality. In both books, Crace weighs the secular and thesacred, the natural and the
supernatural, and the teetering of the balancegenerates a weirdly powerful current.

But wait – it’s time to loop back to the beginning. What happens when youmeet Jim Crace and learn that he
enjoys walking his dog in suburbanparks,likes to birdwatch, takes his
summer vacation in the Isles of Scilly, andsnorkels there, and strolls along
the shore (he loves the intertidal zones,that magically fecund strip
alternately washed and aired by the tides)?What
happens when you discover that he’s a committed atheist? At timesheeven plays the part of the “evangelical atheist” – a very
Cracian phrase. Isthis more or
less important than his political convictions? He’s anunreconstructed leftist; he jokes about his “North Korean”
inflexibility.Does the
knowledge that he strenuously denies the existence of both god andan afterlife color the way we read
Quarantine and Being Dead? It seems atfirst
that it must. As I’ll argue later, it does – though in unexpectedways.

Crace points out that his first four books are about communities intransition. In Continent (1986), which he calls a
“patchwork novel” (sevenseparate stories all cut from the
same cloth), he invented a part of theworld
pressured by progress – the where and the when are hazy, but the placeand its emergent crises are unforgettable. This is pure
Craceland: thegeography just of
reach, like a buried memory or a troubled dream, themoment in time at once specific and curiously elastic. The
Gift of Stones(1988) is set
at a precise historical moment (in the split second beforebronze made stone-age weaponry obsolete) but the seaside
village hedescribes could be
simply out of time. Change comes suddenly, irrevocably,and the human response to it is captured with wonderfully
unclutteredintensity. Arcadia
(1992), Crace’s only urban book, seems to span theages,from the
pre-industrial to the postmodern, in the space of a20th-centurylifetime. Victor was born in a
country village (his father was aharness-maker)
and grew up a beggar in the city. Now, 80 years old andfabulously rich, he aims to replace the city’s open-air
market with a giantmall. The
marketplace vendors are “an awkward bunch, opposed to any changeon principle”; the novel charts
their struggle with Victor (theinevitablevictor) and their stubborn
persistence, even in defeat. Signals of Distress(1994), set in England in 1836, is about the advent of the
industrialage.In the first few pages, two ships,
one powered by steam, the other by sail,are
buffeted by a storm. The action takes place in and around Wherrytown, aname that points in two apt
directions: The community, sustained by itsfishing
fleet, is “wary” of strangers, novelty and change; and the wherry,a sailing barge, is doomed to
obsolescence. Critics praised the book’s“period
precision,” and certain rustic details are particularly striking,like a tilled field at dusk
smothered with the town’s surplus of herring:“a shoal of pilchards staring at the moon, their eyes as dead
as flint,their scales like
beaten tin, their fraying fins and tails like frost,their flesh composting for the next year’s crop.” Crace
delights inannouncing to
interviewers that this detail is wholly invented – fake folklore: As far as he
knows, no 19th-century farmer every fertilizedfields with unwanted fish. (Think of it as the author’s
intertidalfantasy.)

Though not specifically about communities in transition, the next twobooks, Quarantine and Being Dead,
extend Crace’s inquiry into transitionalmoments.
In Quarantine, Jesus apparently makes
the mystic’s leap from bodyto
spirit, a local tremor destined to shake the world – the birth ofChristianity will mark the
beginning of vast cultural transformations. In Being Dead, Joseph and Celice are attacked in the dunes and
in a matter ofminutes pass from
life to death – though death, in this account, is simplynon-being, extinction without sequel. You might say that Being Dead buttsup against the end of transition.Like an echo of our six-year-old-selves, Crace keeps
asking, “What happenswhen we
die?” He returns again and again to those last seconds, as if byrepresenting mortality, by
exposing it from many angles, he might diminishthe dread or mitigate the finality of extinction. Quarantine begins andends with incomplete death: Musa,
left for dead in the first chapter,recovers
miraculously from his fever, casually, accidentally resurrected byJesus. And Jesus himself, though
quite dead by the end of chapter 23 (“Sothis
was death. So this was pain made powerless”), is up and around beforethe end of chapter 25 – he’s
walking the land, “glowing blue and yellow,like
a coal,” alive at least to others. Musa is a worldly man, fat,cynical, brutal and bad; Jesus is
a holy fool, a “god-struck, visionaryboy.”
They are sinner and saint, devil and deity, as different as two mencan be; and so is the way Crace
handles the death – or near-death – of each.

Musa’s mortal illness is of supernatural origin: “A devil had slipped intohis open mouth at night and built a fire beneath the rafters
of his ribs.”Miri, his wife, “smelled the
devil’s eggy dinner on his breath; she heardthe
snapping of the devil’s kindling in his cough” – he’s doomed. Then Jesus
happens along, utters a simple phrase (“ ‘So, here, be well again,’ he said, a
common greeting for the sick”), and Musa is cured; Jesus has presumably cast
out the devil – unintentionally. Calling the fever a devil is not just Miri’s
animist shorthand, nor is it the author’s metaphor for viral or bacterial
infection. This devil is Crace’s invention, an element of the narrative as real
as Miri’s goats or the “angry” desert wind that destroys Musa’s tent. Near the
end of the novel, Musa sets fire to the tattered remnants of his shelter, then
turns and walks away as quickly as he can; the “fever devil,” we’re told, stays
behind, “its feet in the flames, its body shrouded in the yellow smoke.” This
is not Musa’s flight of fancy, it’s Crace’s. The author adds a coda, as to
insist on the fever devil’s independent reality: “It curled above the scrub,
shivering and abandoned, insubstantial and attached to no one, biding its
time.”

Jesus dies of starvation: entirely natural causes. After 30 days without food
or water, 30 days of waiting in vain for supernatural intervention, his body
fails him:

No one has said how painful it would be, how first
there would be headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how the coating
on the upper surface of his tongue would soon become stuck to the upper part of
his mouth, held in place by gluey strings of hunger ... or how his gums would
bleed and his teeth become loose as date stones....

No one had warned him ... how cruelly his
body would begin to eat itself as his muscles and his liver and his kidneys
fought for fuel like squalid desert boys battling for a piece of wood; how his
legs would swell with pus; how his skin would tear and how the wounds would be
too weak to dress themselves with scabs. No one had said, there will be stomach
pains and cramps, demanding to be rubbed and soothed like dogs.

This passage, crowded with bold metaphor, makes a clinical diagnosisuncomfortably vivid. Starvation
and dehydration can be dressed up with colorful images, but they are not
demons; they are biological facts, andcannot
be cast out or appeased by prayer. On the contrary. As Jesusdiscovers,“if you go
into the wilderness to fast, not just your body but your spiritwill, against all faith, begin to
bleed. Your spirit will shed its weight,its
frame will ache, its eyes will dim. You’d be a fool to think that yourspirit is beyond the reach of
thirst and hunger. Nothing is.”

Faith is physically weak, as vulnerable as the body, and the
Quarantine kills it. Jesus had
set out to “encounter god or die,” and in his lastmoments of consciousness, “He felt the cold of nothing there.
He heard thecold of no one
there. No god, no gardens, just the wind.” If Quarantine were only about Jesus, one man alone in the desert,
a dreamer who “put histrust in
god” and find his faith defeated, it might be a bitter skeptic’snovel.

But we also have Musa, the corrupt merchant, the consummate salesman whosespecial skill – the secret of his
salesmanship – is a talent forstorytelling:
“He had been blessed with this one gift. He could telltales.” Musa makes a story out of his deathbed encounter with
Jesus; heelaborates, he
invents. He tells his audience how Jesus “pressed hisfingers on my face. He held a conversation with the fever in
my chest....He plucked the
devil out as easily as you or I might take the stone out ofan olive. He pinched death between his fingertips. He flicked
it onto theground, like that
... as if it were an olive stone....” There’s a pair ofstorytellers at work here, Musa and Crace; between the two of
them, theybring Jesus back from
the dead.

Towards the end of the novel, Musa nearly meets again the man who “pincheddeath between his fingertips.” He
spots a figure in the distance – “it wasJesus,
walking in the mud, bare-footed, naked, thin and brittle as athorn.” Jesus passes by on a lower
path, “walking away from Musa with theconfidence
of someone who was full of god at last.” It’s an eerie moment:“The air became much colder than
it ought to have been. Musa barelydaredto breathe. He could have sworn
the man was glowing blue and yellow,like
acoal.” At this point in the
story – though Musa doesn’t know it yet – Jesus has already died.

Confronted with the fact of Jesus’ wasted, lifeless body, Musa begins todoubt (“He tried to recollect the
figure, gliding on the mud. Had hereallyseen a living face?”), but a
fleeting moment of doubt will hardly deterMusa
from telling the story of Jesus’ resurrection, the story of “a man whohad defeated death.” The merchant
has found new goods to barter: “He’dtrade
the word.... He’d preach the good news.” The merchandise Musa willsell is the potent narrative of
life after death, the greatest story evertold.

In Crace’s story, Jesus’ resurrection spreads some hope almost at once (forfull-blown rejoicing we have to wait for the New Testament
and theestablishment of a
Christian church). Curiously enough, theresurrection
ofthe odious Musa also brings
about a tangible good. The grave Miri dugforhim--unnecessarily, it turns out –
becomes the cistern where the“temporaryhermits” on their Quarantine drink: “it made the forty
days ahead seemalmost
comfortable.” The grave sustains life. “The water tasted rich andsoupy, earth-warm.... It tasted
fertile.” And then, though he lives oninspirit, Jesus’ body is buried in
that same fertile cistern – it’s once againa
grave. The story, both in outline and in detail, points to a repeatedcycle of death and regeneration.

Jim Crace is not given to gnomic utterances, but when he was
talking tomeabout Quarantine, he did come out with one tantalizingly obscure remark:“Even if the book misrepresents
me,” he said, “it represents narrativefully.”
Part of what he means is that as a writer, he allows the narrativeto take control, to follow its own
path. “If a book is going well it willabandon
me,” Crace explained. “I’m a very, very abandoned writer.” Quarantine is the story of how a religious faith was
born--who would besurprised, in
a good story of that kind, to find a miracle or two? Cracethe abandoned writer allows the narrative to misrepresent
Crace theavowedatheist.

But maybe when Crace insists that Quarantine
“represents narrative fully,”he’s
pointing out a very basic feature of storytelling: It thrives onwhat’s next. Once upon a time
triggers a sequence which carries on afterthe
conclusion of the tale. They lived happily ever after is supposed towrap things up, to make the story
whole, to provide “closure,” but italsoopens up a tantalizing realm
beyond the boundary of the narrative. Becauseevery story is made up of a string
of consequence, every story, no matterhow
tidy, suggests a sequel. The limiting pattern of beginning, middleandend has been repeated since ... well, since the beginning,
and by now it’sno longer limiting. It’s a
soothing cycle: Comes the end, comes a newbeginning.
The rhythm of night and day, winter and spring gives us hopefordeath and life. Narrative and regeneration go hand in hand.
This ispart ofwhat Crace acknowledged when he
allowed Quarantine to abandon andmisrepresent him: Every story is
in transition, its beginning tendingtowards
an end which blurs into a new beginning.

Which leads us (now there’s a slick transition) to the challenge Craceposed for himself in Being Dead. In interviews he has
explained that whatprompted him
to write the novel was the lingering pain of his father’sdeath in 1979. He wanted to find "a narrative of
comfort" that couldsubstitute
for the Christian notion of afterlife--and he wanted thiscomforting narrative to fit with his blanket rejection of
religious faith.He wanted to
take on mortality from the atheist’s end-stop perspective, andyet provide consolation. In other
words, he wanted to tell a hopefulstorythat ends.

Being Dead begins with a horrific
scene, a deadly assault on amiddle-agedcouple, Joseph and Celice, who had
planned a nostalgic picnic in the duneswhere
they first made love 30 years earlier. The unlucky couple arebludgeoned to death by a man who
intends to rob them. The shock of thisobscenely
violent beginning serves an important purpose: The hammering ofthe murderer’s jagged chunk of
granite on Celice’s skull, her face, herthroat
(“Seven piston blows in scarcely more than seven seconds”), the evenuglier, lengthier attack on Joseph, capped off with a cruel
kick to thenaked testicles –
all this is meant to push death straight at the reader, tomake
it as inescapable for us as it was for them. Crace forces us toconfront the “plain and
unforgiving facts.” He tells us: “Celice and Josephwere
soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. Theydid not have the power not to die.
They were, we are, all flesh, andthenwe are all meat.”

It could be argued that this sermon on “soft fruit” is merely Crace’s bluntrestatement of the great lines
from King Lear: “Men must endure / Theirgoing hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.”
ButShakespeare’s ripeness could
be construed as a good thing, a timelydeath--death
with dignity. Moreover, "going hence" and "coming hither"suggest at least the possibility
of a point of origin and a destination,something,
somehow, on either end of our lifespan. Crace’sversion – first soft fruit, then “all flesh,” then “all
meat”--plainly refutes the ideathat
a part of us lives on. There is no dignity here; more like thereverse: Crace announces that
Joseph and Celice “were dishonored by thesudden
vileness of their deaths.”

Let me loop back briefly to Quarantine,
to another murder, a donkeybattered
to death with a pestle:Musa
rested, watching while the blood-flow to the donkey’s brain wasblocked by the breakages and
swellings. The nerves, first in her earsandthroat, then in her flank ...
shook and trembled as if the donkey feltnothing
more than unexpected cold. Musa hit her once again. Her face wasfruit. It bruised and split and
wept.This gruesome scene
establishes Musa’s cruelty; after this, it’s easy tobelieve, for example, that he could beat or rape his wife or
anyavailablewoman. But the battering of the
donkey does more; it’s death in the raw--unequivocal,
end-stop death--a corpse to balance against theresurrectionfirst
of Musa and then of Jesus. The dead animal is made of the samestuffas Joseph and Celice (“Her face was fruit”). And the donkey’s
onlyafterlife is painful irony:
Musa orders that the carcass be dropped offtheedge of a precipice, and Jesus,
whose cave is just below, sees it fall. “Adonkey
seemed to come out of mid-air, falling through the sky at him.” Inthe eyes of the “god-struck” Jesus, this is a perplexing
“vision” — “Itsmeaning was
obscure and dark and troubling.” For the reader, the deaddonkey’s meaning is dark and troubling but not in the least
obscure: Itis,we are, all flesh, and then we are
all meat. The rest of Quarantine contradicts
this meaning; Being Dead insists on
it.

What happens to Joseph and Celice once life is extinguished? It startsasslapstick. Chapter 6 of Being
Dead begins like so: “The bodies werediscovered
straight away. A beetle first.” A day later, ugly biologicalfacts still make for painterly
effects: “The skin was piebald. Pallid onthe
upper parts. Livid on the undersides.... Celice, her nose stillpressedagainst the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward flexing
knees and upperthighs were
black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colorless as lard.”Lateron,
Crace does some battering of his own, punishing us with putrefyingflesh, “the pus and debris of
exploded tissue, the ruptured membranesleaking
lymph” – where’s the comfort in this?

Being Dead does more than monitor
rot. Crace sets up a playful narrativeexploration
of time, mortality’s smoldering fuse. Three clocks areticking.First
there’s what you might call the necrometer, which starts tickingat theinstant of death and takes us through the discovery of the
bodies bypolicedogs six days later; it charts
decay and the necrophagous activity of beetles,birds, crabs and rodents; and it monitors, also, the
half-hearted searchconducted by
Syl, the dead couple’s disaffected daughter. A secondclock isantique
by contrast: It takes us back 30 years, to the clumsy courtshipthat led to the marriage of Joseph
and Celice. The first clock tells oftime’s
terminal consequence, the second shows the gradual and inexorableobliteration of the past (the
double whammy of dead and forgotten.)Chancecan make any clock face seem like
a spinning roulette wheel, bringing usabsurd
accidents of good or bad timing: Two people meet at the seashoreandfall in love; three decades later the same two people plan a
picnic atthesame spot and die violently. A
clock’s hands chase round and round,promising
time without end. But despite the tricks time plays, for eachofus the game is drearily predictable: We will die.

Comfort comes from the third clock, which runs backwards, measuring thedayof the murder in reverse. Crace resets this third clock
earlier andearlieruntil it’s morning again (the dial
now reads 6:10), and the couple is safein bed, still asleep as light
breaks--"The dead are resurrected and theylie in bed at backward-running dawn." (Crace told me
that this alternatetime scheme
allows the story to "enfold as opposed to unfold." The ideacame to him suddenly--"It hit
me, on the screen, in a moment ofabandonment.")
Though they have been murdered in an episode of brutalrandom violence that shoves the fact of death in our faces,
the unluckycouple, at the
novel’s end, are tucked back into the comfort of theirdailylife,
their unremarkable ease padded by routine and habit--andignorance oftheir
doom.

Just before this almost happy ending, Crace shares with us the thoughts ofthe couple’s daughter, the
newly-orphaned Syl: “No one transcends,” shethinks.
“There is no future and no past. There is no remedy fordeath – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between. Live
loud. Live wide. Livetall.” Carpe
diem is a standard-issue secular consolation worn thin withrepeated use, and not at all the
sum of Crace’s message. He’s just asinterested,
I’d say, in living narrow but deep, with memory and imaginationcoursing through the channel. With
his third clock, Crace is trying to leadus
to a kind of comfort that may be hard to achieve but brings with it richrewards. Being Dead accomplishes a resurrection of sorts: Joseph and Celiceare “rescued from the dunes by
memory” (or, more accurately, by thenovelist’s
imagination). But perhaps it’s not necessary to bebludgeoned todeath
in order to balance time on either side of the moment, with the pastopen both to the play of fancy and to more reverent
contemplation. To livefully in
both the past and the present is to guarantee a fully livedfuture. And all this without supernatural assistance.

Being Dead reminds me of the epitaph
Yeats asked for in “Under Ben Bulben”:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

But there are no horsemen in Crace’s novel, and "a cold eye" is just
alittle too chilly for the mood
he’s orchestrating. The story of Joseph andCelice
is a rotting-corpse comedy that begins with death, encompasses a30-year love story and ends
happily (sort of), with the banal morninginnocence
of a (doomed) middle-aged couple. Being
Dead is at once macabreand
light-hearted, violent and tender, witty and profound, irreverent andmoving--and perfectly calibrated,
so that all these crosscurrents seem toebb and flow in harmony.

Is the narrative of comfort in Being Dead
as powerful as the promise, heldout
by the narrative in Quarantine,
Christianity’s promise of life afterdeath?
Maybe not; maybe it’s impossible to say without calculating,somehow, the reader’s resistance
to one story or the other--which wouldlargely
depend on whether the reader is inclined to accept the grandChristian narrative or the various
narratives proposed by science. Eitherway, the pairing of these two
books reminds us that our convictions (andour
fears and consolations) come from tales we’re told. Time to meet theteller.

Several weeks after I first called him, I pushed the buzzer at Crace’sdoorand waited, looking up at a modest, semi-detached row house
in apleasant,unremarkable suburb of Birmingham
(it’s the kind of house, Crace confided,his working-class parents aspired
to). The sound of footsteps and therehewas, looking a whole lot like the
photos on the book jackets, but inmotion,
welcoming, affable, eager to talk. The first impression is ofvigor, of well-managed energy.
Crace is neither tall nor broad, and hedoesn’t
swagger, but he’s fit and trim; he seems strong, physicallycapable. He likes to bicycle and to play tennis; it’s easy to
imagine him,at 56, leading a
pack of cyclists or dominating a tennis match with anefficient, powerful serve.

He took me through his agreeably cluttered house, pausing on the way toletme peek into his narrow, crowded office. We sat in the
garden, which islong and
private and lovingly tended (“I’d give up writing,” he said,“before I’d give up gardening”).
We talked plants and birds. I mentionedhis
habit of inventing for his novels creatures like the swag fly and thesprayhopper; manac beans show up
in several of his books. He takesevidentdelight in the game of making
things up, of compelling belief.Eventually
we started to talk about specific novels--something he claims hejust wouldn’t do if it weren’t for
journalists who ask him questions. “I’mnot
introspective about the things that I write,” he said, and addedthathis friends aren’t especially literary. I asked about his
latest book, The Devil’s Larder, and he explained that Quarantine and Being Dead were “hardcompanions,”
and that the writing of them, over the course of four years,had
shaken him. “I needed a break.” He called The Devil’s Larder a jeu d’esprit
– a chance, he said, to think through his ideas about food. Hisnext book, he promised, will be
about love, sex and family. I thought: Herecomes
another hard companion.

Needless to say, this next book won’t be about Jim Crace. “I can’t seemyself in my novels,” he told me.
It was at this point that he talkedabouthow his books "abandon"
him: "You can read them," he insists, "and learnnothing about me." Crace
subscribes to neo-Darwinian theories aboutstorytelling.
He believes that spreading pleasing lies is an adaptivestrategy, that there’s a storytelling gene. (If there is,
he’s clearly gotit.) I’m
generally receptive to the claims of evolutionary psychology – but I’m not
convinced that natural selection helps us to understand where Quarantine came from. My guess is
that the Darwin angle, in thisinstance,is smoke and mirrors, though
there’s something appropriate about Cracethecompulsive storyteller earnestly
peddling the evolution narrative. Itrotted
out my favorite dictum about authors: Wanting to know a writerbecause you like his work is like
wanting to know a duck because you likepaté.
He was quick to agree: “What’s interesting is how books are unliketheir writers. The deep subject is
how narrative and the narrator are sounengaged
with each other.”

Jim Crace is a man of strong political views, an egalitarian who’suncomfortable with the idea of
individual talent – particularly his own. Ashe
sees it, his job is to invent, and then to shape invention. Irememberasking him about how the death of his father, whom he loved,
could haveinspired Being Dead, in which death descends with
exceptional brutality.Crace
looked at me, a bit startled, and said “I wasn’t thinking about myfather when I was writing, I was
dealing with the prose on the page.”Thatsounds right; it returns Crace to his anonymity: The
craftsman,immersed inhis task, disappears.